Episode 394 - Nostalgia, creative fuel?
Oct 1, 2018
Nostalgia! - Where does it fit in the creative process? People are the product of their influences. For a lot of us the strongest influences happen when we're growing up and learning about the world and all the things IN it for the first time. As you get older the things you experience don't make as much impact, simply because your brain has already had most of its “first times” and it's already learned enough about the world to be fully functional and independent.
Topics and Show Notes
“Nostalgia” is strongest when you harken back to those formative experiences, many little “origin stories” so to speak. Art that references nostalgia can make you feel more connected to it, it can give you a mental rush when you recall how much you loved something and looked forward to it, it can transport you back to when you had a particular frame of mind and dwell on that.
Also, things are always cooler looking BACK than when you're actually experiencing them because your mind romanticises and embellishes memories, creating impressionist paintings of them…
The recent film Ready Player on (directed by Spielberg and adapted from a book) plays on pop-culture nostalgia heavily, as well as the nostalgia of formative experiences and contrasts it with the need to live in the present.
Of course nostalgia helped sell that film and made the book a hit. Films, books and comics can use nostalgia in many ways to draw an audience in. Creators can use it to make themselves get enthused for their work.
This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Metal Ice Cream, this sound is a spaceship full of mysterious, robotic, metallic, clunky and compelling dance beats. Grind your gears! Shake that chunky metal body till it rattles!
Topics and shownotes
Featured comic:
Drunk Duck Awards 2018 - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2018/sep/25/featured-comic-drunk-duck-awards-2018/
Links:
Listen to us on Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=224306&refid=stpr
Or TuneinRadio
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
kawaiidaigakusei - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/kawaiidaigakusei/
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/banes
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Featured music:
Metal Ice Cream - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Metal_Ice_Cream/, by DanielLeister, rated T.
Episode 383 - Slow burn
Jul 16, 2018
The idea for this Quackcast came from a rant by the irascible PitFace. She was talking about how there's a trend in modern SciFi and horror movies to bash you over the head with constant action and it doesn't allow you time to relax and take in the story, you're just bounced from one relentless scene to the next. In the biggest classics of the genre like Alien, Ghost in the Shell (animated 90's version) or Blade Runner they DO allow the viewer slow moments of reflection and it helps to make the action feel more intense by contrast as well as allowing the viewer time to assimilate and understand all the ideas and themes they've been presented with so far.
Episode 381 - site upgrades and messing with creators
Jul 2, 2018
We talk about all the new upgrades that DD has just gotten: the new comment notification and reply features (a huge thank you to all who donated and helped out with that!!!), our new notification icons, getting HTTPS on the site, moving to the new ad system after the fall of Project wonderful, maybe starting a Patreon for DD, and Tantz's Sunday Twitter features. We also chat about Tantz's latest newspost and Mks Monster's thread that it was based on: basically the idea of forcing creators into boxes. The idea that women should create certain kinds of work and men should create others. Gunwallace gave us a lovely theme to Sky Commander. This is a very futuristic sounding track, at first glance it’s a little modern for the 1940s set comic but I like to think of it as the flight theme of the Sky Commander as he zooms through the clouds in his shiny metal Streamline Moderne gear, producing an expanding vapour trail behind him, crisp and white against the eggshell blue sky.
Episode 379 - Troptastic
Jun 18, 2018
ALL the tropes!!!! Based on Emma Clare's newspost, tropes are damn useful but they can also be your undoing if you handle them badly. Tropes are shortcuts to meanings, scenes, procedures or jokes that take too long to set up in their own right. You can use them like prefabricated parts to build your story, Lego if you will. You really should know how to use them correctly though. If it's for jokes, then work on them and expand on them, if it's for more serious stuff then you should know WHERE those tropes come from so you use them correctly. We chat about tropes, boob-slips, Doki Doki, Baka and Test, Kung Fury, Satan Ninja 198X, and Vaporwave among other things. Gunwallace gave us a lovely theme to Yasu no Monogatari this week: Floating out on a blue river of dreams into an echoing crystal cave illuminated by thousands of refracted glittering lights, traveling on your way further underground, deeper and deeper to more exciting and mysterious sites.
Episode 377 - Your Best Work?
Jun 4, 2018
In this Quackcast we're talking about your best work… Our best work in this case. What are YOU most proud off? Please share it with us so that we can promote it. We all talk about some of the projects that we think came out the best for us. For me it was Pinky TA 6 which came out 12 years ago now! But I'm really quite proud of the art on each new page. For Banes it was the “Pop goes the World” chapter of Typical Strange. For Pitface it was ALL of Putrid Meat. And for Tantz it's the movie that she was a writer on, 731. What is yours? Please tell us and give us a link. Describe the work you're most proud off and why you're most proud of it. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Captain Galactose. Fast, frenetic side scroller beat-em-up action! This tune slams into you, rolling with a flurry of quick punches and kicks, overwhelming you in seconds and moving onto the next levelboss!
Episode 376 - Comic Tutorials
May 28, 2018
kawaiidaigakusei makes a return to the Quackcast! Together with the crew we chat about some of our favourite comic making tutorials on DD. Yes, there IS a tutorials section on the site and people have created some amazing and clever tutes on how to both write and draw better when making your comics. There are some cool instructions on how to make better pages, write scripts, do rain effects, all sorts of shortcuts and clever tit-bits of info to have you creating like a pro. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Potato and Kraut. Feel the gigantic weight this music layers onto your shoulders. A synthesised torrent of gravity, followed by the heavy, deep notes of a piano dropping on top of you like frozen slabs. The torrent slowly eases, brings light and relief, then fades away.
Episode 375 - Categories, genres and rants
May 21, 2018
In this Quackcast we chat about the categorisation of work by specific genres and how it makes it easier to promote your work to people, while for fans it makes it easier to find what you're into, but it can also be a bad thing when people categorise too specifically and narrow their audience to nothing or just pointlessly confuse the crap out of people. I came to this topic because I saw a post on Facebook which was very badly explaining “Steampunk” and “Dieselpunk” while introducing the two utterly superfluous sub-genre names of “Ray-punk” and Atom-punk“.
Episode 374 - Selling yourself
May 14, 2018
In this Quackcast we have a chat about some ways to promote your comics and sell yourself. Emma Clare and Tantz have been doing cool stuff with the DD Twitter account. Hash tags are an important part of that, help them come up with a hash tag for DD! Who understands hash-tags on Facebook? Covers are one of my favourite ways to promote your work. They're tricky to get right but you need them to properly encompass your work and promote it, the form they take can depend on where your work is: Amazon, Drunk Duck, a convention, targeted ads etc. But be careful not to disappoint your audience with false advertising. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Coward of Valor. It's a Modern yet medieval, this tune strides in with great pomposity and deigns to dance for us. It pirouettes and swoops in all its beauty and extravagance then exits stage left with just as much flare.
